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REVIEW: Irresponsible Adult by Lucy Vine


Sisters Cleo and Robyn may be close in age but their attitudes to life could not be further apart. While Cleo's a fully-fledged adult with a family, a business and a signature scent, Robyn is still waiting for the instruction manual to Adult Life and success is keeping her houseplant alive. Skating by at her job as an estate agent, she's adept at avoiding housework, ignoring admin, and evading her mother's anxious questions about her love life. But then Robyn's fired in the most publicly humiliating way imaginable - and her chaos catches up with her.

Although Cleo steps in to give Robyn a temporary job in her cleaning firm, it comes with very firm instructions: Robyn must BEHAVE RESPONSIBLY. And that includes meeting the high standards of Jim, her enigmatic supervisor. But when Robyn learns to navigate the catastrophic kitchens and judgemental dogs of total strangers she learns some unexpected truths about her own messy world. No one's life is spotless...

"I am not a tidy person, literally or metaphorically. My life has always felt like a patchwork of moments, rather than a a smoothly unrolling carpet of interlocking patterns, and my brain is even more random: it jumps from one idea to the next, worrying, forgetting, second-guessing, panicking, third-guessing."

Lucy Dillon is undeniably a queen of cosy fiction — she’s one of those authors who perfectly blends feel-good with all the feels to make something moving and beautiful.

From the first few lines, I felt connected to our main character - her casual, personable voice and conversational narration style made it so easy to get settled in - Robyn was going through catastrophe after catastrophe that made me want to cover my eyes but I couldn’t look away because she just made me feel seen in that lost twenty-something woman way that was so relatable.

As we go through Robyn’s slightly chaotic life, we get a little glimmer of romance, some family drama, and a lot of self-discovery along the way.

A playful, fun and painfully relatable story with a dash of romance - another feel-good hit from Lucy Dillon.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

  • Irresponsible Adult will be available from May 23rd with Hodder & Stoughton.
  • I was gifted an advanced reviewers copy of this title. 

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